Managing Web Sites

It is important to manage your published Web content so that it stays fresh, and that you add, link to, and highlight popular content and delete stale content. SharePoint provides several methods for managing activity across your sites including auditing activity, site usage reports, setting and extending quotas, and deleting unused sites.

Auditing activity

There are many options to configure the auditing of activities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site collections. You may enable the auditing of documents and items, or configure site searching and lists for auditing. These actions are performed from the Site Settings menu of the site collection you want to configure.

To configure audit settings, follow these steps:

1.	Click the Site Actions menu in the top right corner of the site collection that you want to audit.
2.	Choose Modify All Site Settings from the Site Settings menu on the site you want to configure.
3.	In the Site Collection Administration section, click the Site collection audit settings link.
4.	On the Configure Audit Settings page, in the Documents and Items section, select the events you want to audit, as shown in Figure 11.22: Opening or downloading documents, viewing items in lists, or viewing item properties Editing items Checking out or checking in items Moving or copying items to another location in the site Deleting or restoring items Figure 11.22. Configuring the events that you want to audit [View full size image]
5.	In the Lists, Libraries, and Sites section, select the events you want to audit: Editing content types and columns Searching site content Editing users and permissions
6.	Click OK.

To view the logs of the events you selected for auditing in an Excel Web page, perform the following steps:

1.	Click the Site Actions menu in the top right corner of the site collection that you want to audit.
2.	Choose Modify All Site Settings from the Site Settings menu on the site you want to configure.
3.	In the Site Collection Administration section, click the Audit log reports link.
4.	On the View Auditing Reports page, select the report you want to view and select whether you want to open or save the file, as shown in Figure 11.23. Figure 11.23. Opening an audit report [View full size image]

Configuring site usage analysis reports

You can also configure SharePoint to process usage analysis reports so that you can view usage activity on a site-by-site basis. Usage analysis provides reports for top pages, top referring sites, top users, and top referring pages for your sites.

To enable usage analysis processing, follow these steps:

1.	Open Central Administration for your SharePoint farm and click the Operations tab.
2.	Select Usage analysis processing from the Logging and Reporting section.
3.	Select the Enable logging check box and confirm the correct location of your log files, as shown in Figure 11.24. Figure 11.24. Enabling usage analysis processing for your Web farm [View full size image]
4.	Select the Enable usage analysis processing check box and enter the hours that you want SharePoint to process the log files.
5.	Click OK.
6.	Open your Shared Service Provider administration page.
7.	In the Office SharePoint Usage Reporting section, select Usage reporting.
8.	Select the Enable advanced usage analysis processing check box as shown in Figure 11.25. Figure 11.25. Configuring the usage processing for the Shared Services Provider [View full size image]
9.	Select Enable search query logging if you want usage on search queries used as well.
10.	Click OK.

To view the usage analysis processing reports, follow these steps:

1.	Click the Site Actions menu in the top-right corner of the site for which you want to view usage analysis reports.
2.	Choose Modify All Site Settings from the Site Settings menu on the site for which you want to view the usage report.
3.	Select Site usage reports from the Site Administration section.

Extending quotas

Quotas and locks are two methods of controlling access to site collections. By employing the use of locks, site administrators can manually prevent user access.

Quotas are used to prevent users from adding content to a site collection or provide e-mail warning notification to the site collection administrator when specified limits on disk space are passed.

It is also possible to create and edit site quota templates that you can use during site creation. Site quotas are configured from the Application Management page of the Central Administration Web application.

Configuring site quotas

To configure site quotas, follow these steps:

1.	From the Application Management page of the Central Administration site, click Site collection quotas and locks from the SharePoint Site Management section.
2.	Choose the site collection to configure from the drop-down list in the Site Collection section.
3.	In the Site Lock Information section, choose the desired level of access to the chosen site collection, as shown in Figure 11.26. Figure 11.26. Configuring site quotas [View full size image]
4.	In the Site Quota Information section, choose the quota template you want to modify, and then select one or both of the following: Check the Limit site storage to a maximum of box, and then enter the amount of disk space in megabytes (MB). Check the Send warning e-mail when site storage reaches box, and then enter the amount of disk space in megabytes (MB).
5.	Click OK.

Configuring quota templates

Quota templates help you manage groups of sites so that when they are created or when you need to apply a template, the quota is already defined. To configure quota templates, from the Application Management page of the Central Administration site, click Quota templates from the SharePoint Site Management section and then perform one of the following two tasks.

• Select the Edit an existing template radio button.
  
  

  1. Choose the existing quota template you want to modify.
  
  

  2. Check the boxes next to the storage limit values you want to modify.
  
  

  3. Enter the new storage limit values and click OK.
  
  

  Or:
  
  
• Select the Create a new quota template radio button.
  
  

  1. Choose the template to start from, as shown in Figure 11.27.
  
  

  Figure 11.27. Creating a new site quota template

  [View full size image]

  

  
  

  2. Give the new template a name.
  
  

  3. Check the boxes next to the storage limit values you want to modify.
  
  

  4. Enter the new storage limit values and click OK.
  
  

Deleting unused sites

There are two methods of managing unused sites in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. You can either send notices to site collection owners requiring confirmation that the site collections are in use to keep the number of unused Web sites on your server in check; or you can configure sites to be automatically notified if site owners do not confirm that the site is not in use.

Upon creation of a site collection, the site is added to the database and logged as an active site. After a specified time, e-mail notification is sent to the site collection owner asking the owner to either reconfirm or delete the unused site collection. The e-mail notification contains links to alternately confirm that a site collection is active or to delete the inactive site collection. There are three scenarios in which to decide to keep or delete a site collection based on the configuration of unused site settings:

• The site collection owner confirms that the site collection is active and the site collection is preserved. When the owner clicks the confirmation link, the certification date of the site automatically renews.

• The site owner may delete the site collection by following the instructions in the e-mail notification. If no action is taken, the owner will continue to receive e-mail notifications according to the interval the server administrator specifies until the owner confirms that the site collection is in use or deletes the site collection.

• If the automatic deletion feature has been enabled, e-mail notifications are sent to the site collection owner the number of times specified by the site administrator. If the site collection owner does not confirm site collection use, the site collection is deleted automatically.

Automatic deletion of unconfirmed site collections may be provisioned from the Central Administration site. This feature can be enabled and configured from the Application Management page of the Central Administration Web application.

To configure automatic site deletion, follow these steps:

1.	From the Central Administration Web application, click Application Management.
2.	In the SharePoint Site Management group, click Site use confirmation and deletion.
3.	Select the Web application from the drop-down list of the Web Application section.
4.	Specify whether or not you would like to send e-mail notification to site collection owners.
5.	Determine when e-mail notification of unused sites should begin.
6.	Specify the intervals to run checks for unused sites, and at what time they should occur.
7.	Check the Automatically delete the site collection if use is not confirmed box to enable automatic site deletion, as shown in Figure 11.28. Figure 11.28. Configuring automatic site deletion [View full size image]
8.	Specify how many notifications should be sent prior to initiating automatic site deletion.
9.	Click OK.